David Emery OnlineFriday Links XXXVII
Andrew Kuo: No Lifeguard on Duty
I love infographics, and especially the colours used here.
EMI To Release Radiohead Boxset
What a utterly shameless cash-in on the hype caused by In Rainbows. I’ve heard that this box set was used as a threat by EMI when they were negotiating their new contract – no wonder they didn’t re-sign with those sort of tactics. I do kind of want that USB stick though…
Boing Boing’s new community features!
Interesting that they seem to be doing this all on top of Moveable Type. Does anyone really want yet another social network tacked onto a website, though?
FaceBook’s Hotmail problem
Seth has – as always – a good point, but he fails to recognise that the people that Facebook are selling to are advertisers, not the consumers looking at the ads. As long as the people book the ads think they work, then Facebook is ok. Also, I’m under the impression that Hotmail is still very successful.
2M
After having used it for a couple of weeks, I’m still very impressed by 10.5.
Try Again
“For heaven’s sake: Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with...
My Style
Inspired by a couple of posts by Khoi and Shaun (you say rip off from I say inspired by) today I’m going to run through the basic devices and elements I commonly fall back on when it comes to designing a web site. It’s a very interesting exercise – at least form my point of view – as I think it’s always a good idea to be aware of how you work; that awareness can help both when you’re trying to do something different (and deliberately go against your ‘style’) and also when you’re completely up against it and need to turn something around quickly.
So, without further ado:
Helvetica
Well, I’ve got to start with the basics, haven’t I? Helvetica – I think – is by far and away the best web font out there. As web developers we don’t really get much choice in fonts, and when looking at sans-serif fonts it’s pretty much between Helvetica and Verdana – I’m not sure if I’ve ever chosen Verdana, except for body text on occasion.
Of course here I’ve put myself out on a limb and used the lovely Gill Sans all over the place, but most people don’t have it...
Read more ➔Music / Advertising
We now know why Google rushed the OpenSocial announcement out the door – Facebook have finally revealed their new Facebook Ads system. Now, a simple ads system wouldn’t really be worthy of much comment, and certainly wouldn’t have Google running scared, but Facebook Ads is so much more then just advertisements.
The key new part that the new system revolves around is the new ability for brands, businesses and artists to create pages on Facebook. These pages act like a cross between a traditional Facebook profile page and a MySpace profile page; they share the normal Facebook components like a Mini-Feed, Wall, Information and a profile picture but then add ‘Fans’ – which are the equivalent of friends – and a discussion board. They are in essence a combination of a profile page and a group.
To set up they are very simple – just head over to the ads home page and hit the big green button. I set up one for myself very easily (what? Are you trying to deny my celebrity status?). After you’ve set up a page, which can seemingly be linked to an existing account or be standalone, you get a new app in...
Read more ➔Nothing to see here
As I suspected all along, there is no gPhone – no consumer hardware product from Google, an ostensibly software company. Unsurprisingly instead, we get a mobile phone operating system instead.
Or do we?
Clue one is that ‘Android’ (Google is all about the friendly product names…) is based on Linux. Not an Operating System as such then, but a GUI I guess. Well, except we haven’t actually seen it, so that could well be an existing mobile linux-based GUI (and don’t go thinking that running a mobile on Linux is exciting, there are plenty already on the market). Anyway; the GUI probably doesn’t matter too much, as it’s all about the web browser, apparently – which I’m sure won’t just be a mobile version of Firefox.
Oh.
Wait.
Didn’t Mozilla just announce a mobile version of Firefox? And don’t lots of Firefox developers work for Google?
Apparently this new mobile platform ”...will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today” which tells you absolutely nothing about the capabilities of ‘Android’ but all you need to know about how far the traditional marketing types have wormed their way into Google. Knowing absolutely nothing is in...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXXVI
The Superest
Superhero illustration vs Superhero illustration – totally brilliant.
Leopard, Notes, and the iPhone
Come on Apple – get this feature done, we all know it’s coming.
Googling with Coverflow
What a great idea and – with the presence of WebKit – probably fairly do-able.
Get rid of your code with Leopard
We’re going to see some seriously cool 3rd party apps running on 10.5.
The social part of blogging is broken
” I don’t expect everybody to blog or use twitter and consider it very dangerous indeed to go down that route as it does smell of inbreeding to me.” – so, so true.
Robot arm inscribes the Luther Bible around the clock
This greatly amuses me, for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on.
Mixa-it
Silly, but kind of nifty.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review
A must read due to it’s extreme attention to some of the finer technical details in 10.5. However, I firmly disagree with some of the points about the Finder interface (which I think is much better then 10.4) and the general aesthetics. Both presented as fact, but both are a matter of personal taste.
OpenSocial
Google have finally made their move and shown their cards. They’re going after Facebook, and taking no prisoners, with their new OpenSocial initiative.
Not only that but they’ve dragged MySpace, Bebo, Six Apart, LinkedIn, Ning, Plaxo, Friendster, Oracle, iMeem, Orkut and more with them.
Wow! Facebook has really got a lot of people running scared, hasn’t it? Sadly for them I don’t think OpenSocial is really going to help them all that much.
OpenSocial is in essence an open version of Facebook’s developer APIs – all the bits that let you create apps on Facebook. With OpenSocial you can create things like Facebook apps that will work on any OpenSocial supporting platform, which can integrate in completely with the host site and have access to things like buddy lists, news feeds and the like. It’s a very emphatic shot across Facebooks bows, utterly one-upping them and making them look closed (when their whole schtick with apps has been ‘open’).
The problem is, however, that OpenSocial is coming at completely the wrong end of the closed-social-network problem. Bar far and away the biggest problem in social networking is fatigue, that to join yet another site you have to sign-up again, fill in all...
Read more ➔Nice Dream
Today is party day.
No joke.
I will be working on Radiohead.
It doesn’t really get any better then that, does it?
Read more ➔Animate & Transform
Short but very sweet today.
Whatever they’re smoking over on the WebKit team at Apple they need to put in a shiny box, slap a lowercase ‘i’ in front of it and ship it direct into Apple stores.
Check out CSS Transforms and CSS Animation.
They seriously rock!
Briefly, CSS Transforms allow a web developer to scale, rotate and generally transform any piece of content on a web page, including text and images, and also presumably Flash plugins, QuickTime etc. CSS Animation (shockingly enough!) lets you animate any change in any property in CSS, so for example if you change a border on rollover you can have that change fade in, or if you’re using one of the transforms you can couple them with animation as well.
Of course, due to the wonders good implementation all of these new CSS properties will gracefully degrade on all other browsers – so the animation properties will get simply ignored and the change will happen instantly, for example. The only negative point I can see is that it’s a shame these didn’t make Safari 3 that ships with Leopard (and presumably will get released for Windows and 10.4 as well) but it’s a pretty minor quibble.
These...
Read more ➔Master Plan
Today, lets play a little game of ‘What if’:
What if Google – the biggest single source of traffic on the internet, and also the biggest advertising network – decided that it didn’t like one of its upstart competitors, and penalised people that used them so they didn’t get so much traffic from Google.
Wouldn’t that be a bit, well, evil?
Of course, all’s fair in love and war and all that, and it’s no surprise that for the sake of its adverts – which are Google’s bread and butter – they’d be prepared to fight dirty. It’s still a sharp reminder of how much power and control Google has, though. Personally, I don’t think Text-Link-Ads (and the people that place them on their sites) have done anything wrong from an ‘accurate search result’ point of view, so to punish them seems to be more then a little anti-competative.
It’s a very grey area though, in Google’s fairness; where exactly do you draw the line between something like Text-Link-Ads (which are normally obviously ads) and something like Pay-Per-Post (which look like normal blog/news posts, but are sponsored)? One is an obvious attempt to dupe Google into upping the PageRank...
Read more ➔Friday Links XXXV
How to Snatch an Expiring Domain
What an utterly insane process.
Hotel Honesty
Honesty really is the best policy.
Put yourself on the map
Hmm, a mapping based social network from Google? Interesting…
Something new in News
I’m unconvinced, in the same way I’m unconvinced by the whole river-of-news thing, but I’m interested in the experimentation.
Dopplr Blog: In rainbows
Not about a certain Oxford band, before you ask. The colour coding of different towns on Dopplr is genius, but then using that dynamically as the logo on the page is even better. I’m more impressed by Dopplr every day.
RCRD LBL Slated for an 11/15 Launch
I’m watching with interest.
Branding NYC
The more I think about it the more I think that Wolff Olins – of 2012 logo infamy – are doing some of the best design design work around at the moment. Challenging is a good thing.
Gmail gets IMAP
Pretty nifty, although I’m the only person left on the planet that doesn’t use Gmail (I’ll look after my mail, thanks).
Huge pirate music site shut down
OiNK was a pretty huge deal, so this is an interesting development.